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Sonja
'' "It's a game as old as Cain. If you could kill one person and get away with it... who would it be? You get your kneejerk noble answers: pick your favorite dictator and put a bullet in his brain. You get your joke answers: 'You, Steve, unless you throw in your share for takeout.' '' "Everybody laughs or waxes wise for a while, and the game's over. But late that night, in the wide open cold of can't-get-to-sleep, when it's nobody but you, you realize you ''do have a name.'' '' "Everybody has one..."'' Background (Mouse-over bold text for the mechanical bits it relates to) Born in Bristol to an English father and Indian mother, Sonja was, like any Sin-Eater to be... different. Her parents never understood why their daughter took so long to say her first words, why she always seemed to recoil from the people around her, even as a child. How could they understand, as blissfully rational as they were, that she had every reason to be afraid? Perhaps if she'd been taken to an exorcist, or some other expert on the supernatural, things would have turned out differently, but all her parents knew was that their child was troubled, terrified of the people around her, and no psychologist seemed able to help her. The crux of her trouble--her "gift"--was that she could hear the whispers of rage and violent intent in those around her, no matter how small. Every face was a predator's face, every word a threat of dark and primal violence. Everyone she met seemed ready and eager to kill, and she was the only one who could see it. It's no wonder that she cut herself off from the world around her, a self-imposed and self-preserving avoidance of contact with the human world she simply could not relate to. It wasn't until she was 12 that her parents finally, to her mind, gave up on her, sending her to a boarding school in New England that specialized in troubled youths. They couldn't possibly have known that a locked and barred compound boiling over with misguided adolescent rage was the worst place in the world for her--but the action nonetheless severed the relationship she had with her parents, the closest thing to healthy human contact she'd ever known. For the first time in her life, she was well and truly alone. All the same, despite the terror of being put out on her own in a sea of killers' voice with no chance of escape--'or perhaps ''because there was no chance of escape'''--she finally began to fight back against her "gift." The staff at the school seemed nearly as hateful as the students, but in time she learned to listen past the violence and hear what they had to say. They couldn't make her problems go away; they couldn't even really understand what her problems were, at the source. But in time she learned to mitigate it, to suffer through the anger and fear--and, at times, to distract herself from it. Her free time was a hurricane of side activity, diving with fervor into one hobby after another, looking for something--''anything''--that could occupy the place in her mind where the fear rested. Word games and puzzles, bird-watching, tinkering and tailoring all found a place in her life as blessed respites from her condition. When she grew older, they were joined by boxing, which the staff called "a healthy and controlled outlet for our violent impulses," and camping and hiking, which was "an outlet for the desire for solitude." But in the end, all distractions are only temporary, and when each project was finished she was stuck back in a world filled with fearful visions. No matter how hard she tried, now matter how close she came, she could never ignore the fear, could never trust anyone enough to make a friend. Surrounded as she was by people, she was tortured by the unfulfilled promise of change, starved of anything approaching healthy human relationships. Eventually, it became too much for her, and at 17 she fled the school. Experienced as she was with avoiding people and being a ghost, she was never found--maybe they never even looked. All she knew was that the road was in front of her... and it looked pretty much identical to the road behind her. In the short years to follow, she made one final play at ridding herself of her curse, turning to the idea that something unnatural had affected her and only something equally unnatural could cure her. But in the end, without a proper teacher and no real ability to ask anyone for help, none of the dozens or hundreds of remedies, none of the desperate prayers she tried were anywhere close to effective. Eventually, she simply came to something approaching acceptance, and tried to live her life as well as she could, eventually finding her way to Tucson and moving from one graveyard shift to another to make ends meet. It was on one night, her last night, when she was walking home from work at 2:00 in the morning, always sticking to the alleyways to avoid running into anyone, that a mugger stepped out of the shadows, brandishing a gun and demanding her wallet. The aura of violence and death was on him, drowning her in it and bringing her back to the solitude she'd been running from her entire life. And in that moment, crushed by the weight of it all, she finally broke. She refused to give the man anything, knowing that he would kill her and end it all--and he did... but it wasn't the end. In those moments following death, her blood pooling in the alley beneath a cloud of gunsmoke, something spoke to her, whispering in a voice that was bloody mist and gunfire, choking with tears of despair and the crunch of steel against bone. It offered her a second chance at life, one where she didn't need to hide, didn't need to be afraid, where all her distractions could be real joys and she would be free to experience things she couldn't even have imagined in her old life--and where, just if she really wanted it, she could smile a hunter's smile at the people she used to think were dangerous. The Bargain was like two lungs full of air when she'd spent her whole life drowning, and since she pulled herself off of a bed of dried blood and dust she hasn't looked back. Flavor Full Name: Sonja Adelaide Carmichael Geist: The Bloody Contessa Virtue: Relentless Vice: Curious Archetype: Celebrant Threshold: The Silent Attributes Skills Academics Computer Crafts ●● (Sewing) Investigation ●● (Cryptography) Medicine Occult Politics Science Athletics ●●● Brawl ●●● Drive Firearms Larceny Stealth ●● Survival ●●● Weaponry Animal Ken ●● (Birds) Empathy ● Expression Intimidation Persuasion ●● Socialize Streetwise ●● Subterfuge Merits Encyclopedic Knowledge: Occult ●● Resources ● Ceremonies: Krewe Binding ● Taste ● Effect: With a Wits + Skill roll, depending on the creation in question (Expression for poetry, Crafts for architecture, for example), your character can pick out obscure details about the item that other, less discerning minds would not. For each success, ask one of the following questions, or take a +1 bonus to any Social rolls pertaining to groups interested in the art assessed for the remainder of the scene. * What is the hidden meaning in this? * What was the creator feeling during its creation? * What’s its weakest point? * What other witness is most moved by this piece? * How should one best appreciate this piece? Street Fighting ●● *Duck and Weave (●): Your character has been beaten all to hell more than a few times. Now she dodges on instinct, not on skill. You can reflexively take a one-die penalty to any actions this turn in order to use the higher of her Wits and Dexterity to calculate Defense. If you’ve already made a roll without penalty this turn, you cannot use Duck and Weave. *Knocking the Wind Out (●●): Shots to the center mass can shake an opponent, and your character knows this well. When your character makes a successful unarmed attack, the opponent suffers a –1 to his next roll. Professional Training: Charonist ● *Asset Skills: Streetwise, Occult *Contacts: Newspapers, Ham radio Haunt, Shared ● * Residue ● Keys and Manifestations Keys: Primeval, Stillness Curse ●● Shroud ● Notable Equipment Keystone Memento: The Contessa's Wineglass *Threshold: The Silent *Skill: Persuasion *Keys: Primeval, Passion Susie Q: Just an old beat-up yellow VW Beetle, but it gets her where she needs to go. Cheat Sheet https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BaugYFlB5EIQPMJw16mUfh15x38GDaa57zlfOd7ddsc/edit?usp=sharing